that most years the herring shoals fail to materialize, yet adult
puffins, driven by some powerful attachment to this place, keep
coming back to breed. The food shortage forces parents to aban
don their young and lately even seems to have affected laying
and hatching rates. During the past quarter century the yearly
die-off of chicks has shrunk the R0st supercolony by hundreds of
thousands of puffins.
HY DO PUFFINS MATTER? To Icelanders and Faroe
Islanders, who hunt these birds for meat, there is a
practical motive to conserve them. For me, a more
compelling reason lies in what we can learn from the
link between puffins and the sea. In studying puffin societies
how they function, evolve, and decline-we also find out about
the well-being of the oceans. Such knowledge is crucial, for
ocean waters are to the planet as blood is to the human body.
But there is more to puffins than that. I have a soft spot for
puffins just because they are puffins. It could be the swaggering
Chaplinesque walk. Or the horn-rimmed stare from behind the
painted wedge of a beak, which makes a vivid complement to
the tangerine-colored feet. Or the fat little body--a puffin looks
about as aerodynamic as a potbellied pig.
Contrary to popular belief, the puffin is not a flying penguin.
There are four species, all related to the great auk, which was
hunted to extinction last century. Members of the auk family live
in the Northern Hemisphere and can fly; penguins live in the
Southern Hemisphere and cannot. The tufted puffin, the horned
puffin, and the rhinoceros auklet-an oddity whose skeletal
structure places it in the puffin camp-are spread throughout the
North Pacific, along with most of their 20 auk relatives, includ
ing auklets, murres, murrelets, the dovekie, and the razorbill.
But the bird of my affections is the Atlantic puffin, Fratercula
arctica, the only puffin found in the Atlantic Ocean, where it is
widely distributed. I have studied the social behavior and feed
ing habits of Atlantic puffins for 20 years-about five years less
than the life of a healthy puffin.
Judging from the overall numbers, the Atlantic puffin is not
about to follow the great auk into oblivion. The total breeding
population probably exceeds ten million, and there are several
million immatures and nonbreeders besides. Even in the Faroe
Islands and northern Norway, where populations are diminish
ing, many of the colonies are still large. A puffinry can remain
viable if as few as two chicks survive from each pair's lifetime
breeding effort.
Despite the robust state of the puffin nation, local losses have
spurred people to rally around this popular bird. In the Gulf of
Maine, where hunters all but obliterated Atlantic puffins in the
U. S. during the late 1800s, the National Audubon Society is
conducting an ambitious restoration project. And in the Shet
land Islands puffins are thriving again after a series of disastrous
seasons led to a temporary ban on fishing for sand lances in
1991. These small fish, a food staple of Shetland seabirds, are
processed into livestock feed. But there may have been more to
the decline of the sand lance than overfishing. It is also possible
that natural changes in ocean currents reduced the population,
Province of
the Atlantic
Puffin
The puffin's cuteness belies
a resilience demanded by its
unforgiving territory, the
North Atlantic and adjoin
ing seas. One of four puffin
species worldwide, the
Atlantic puffin, Fratercula
arctica, spends most of its
life inopen ocean, coming
ashore to nest and rear a
NationalGeographic, January1996
118